


where the time goes

by foxfireflamequeen



Series: those who move mountains [2]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: 2018 Winter Olympics, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-29
Updated: 2017-03-29
Packaged: 2018-10-12 16:57:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10495437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxfireflamequeen/pseuds/foxfireflamequeen
Summary: Yuri does not medal at Pyeongchang.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Omake/epilogue for [here's to the glory still to be](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10457838). Please read that first or this won't make much sense.
> 
> Otabek is Denis Ten, Plushenko wants to compete in 2018 at 35 years old, and yes, I manipulated the facts of skating, again.

 

 

Viktor’s theme for the season is swan song, and with the most insane, inspired choreography he’s put together in years, he shatters both Yuri and Katsuki’s records during the Grand Prix and takes gold at Pyeongchang. He makes history, again, officially tying Grafström’s record of three successive Olympic figure skating golds and four Olympic figure skating medals total. Considering his age and year-long break from competitive skating, despite his peak conditioning and lack of injuries, this is, in fact, a surprise.

Katsuki, who came in second to Viktor at Skate Canada and the GPF, lets his anxiety get the better of him at the last second and gets edged off silver by Otabek, who also makes history by taking the first Olympic medal, ever, for Kazakhstan.

Yuri, whose body for some fucking reason held off on betraying him until the _year of the Olympics_ , barely scrapes together a fifth place finish. It’s humiliating, not least because when Leroy beats him to fourth he cries on international television.

The good thing about athletes is that no one tries to tell him fifth place out of thirty is respectable, or that he only flubbed those jumps because of his growth spurt. They just pat his back at the afterparty in the village, commiserating, and join him in shooting envious looks towards the eighteen medalists who, if they have any sense of propriety at all, will call it a night within the hour and leave the rest of them to bitch and feel sorry for themselves.

They do. Katsuki is too nice to notice, probably, but Viktor has been here before, and he’s the first to put his arm around his fiancé’s shoulders and bid everyone goodnight when the champagne starts flowing. He shoots a speaking look towards Mila as he goes, and to her credit, she only hesitates for a moment before smiling at the Crispino girl and following him out the door.

Soon, Otabek is the only medalist left, and he looks between the door and Yuri, confused and out of his element. He’s the newest of the new here, the first and _only_ from his country, still too dazed from his victory to pick up on the etiquette. Yuri bites the inside of his cheek and forces himself to walk over, bump their shoulders together even though all he wants to do is run away and hide.

“You should go,” he says quietly. “Everyone here feels shitty about themselves. Couple more drinks in them and they’ll stop being kind.”

Otabek snorts, but he puts down his flute of half-drunk champagne. “Figure skaters are never kind,” he says. “Do you want to leave too?”

The only other people in this room who Yuri could have called friends, including the Russian ice dancing duo who took bronze and the pair skaters who won gold, had to exit early. He doesn’t particularly want to stay here, but he can barely bring himself to look at Otabek now, and Otabek doesn’t deserve the vitriol building in Yuri like slow, seeping radiation.

“No,” he says. “I hear Chulanont smuggled in his hamsters.”

Otabek gives him a slightly disbelieving look, because hamsters or no, Yuri isn’t a big fan of Phichit Chulanont. But he must get some idea that Yuri feels more comfortable here, tonight, than with him, and he nods.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he says, but his voice lilts up at the end like a question.

Yuri isn’t sure tomorrow will be much better, but various sources tell him the first night is the worst and he’s a little desperate to believe them, so he says, “Sure.”

 

 

 

Once Otabek is gone, turns out there’s literally nothing Yuri wants less than to hang out in a room full of drunk skaters taking potshots at each other and making snide comments about overscoring the Russian team skate and medalists. Someone makes an off-color joke about Katsuki and Viktor’s relationship and too few people jump to their defense, so Yuri grabs a bottle of champagne and makes a break for it before anyone has a chance to say something worse about Otabek, or Mila.

 

 

 

Viktor finds him some time later, tucked into a corner of their village hotel, well past tipsy and on his way to drunk. He ignores Yuri’s glare and sits on the floor across from him and picks up the quarter-full bottle.

“If you’re going to tell me you didn’t even qualify for your first Olympics, save it,” Yuri tells him, reaching to snatch the bottle back. Viktor raises it away and puts it to his own lips, taking a long swallow.

“Technically, I qualified,” he says. “But the Federation didn’t pick me.”

“I don’t want to know,” Yuri bites back. Viktor smiles at him, close-lipped and infuriating, and Yuri wonders if he’d have to pay a fine if he punched his own teammate. Probably, considering Viktor bruises like a fucking peach.

He cuts off that train of thought as viciously as he can and grabs for the bottle again. Viktor lets it go, eyes tracking his face with uncomfortable intensity. Yuri _hates_ it when he looks at him like that. Viktor is the most observant at the most inconvenient times.

“You’re only seventeen. You have time, Yura,” he says carefully. _Yura_ , he’s said since he came back; not Yuri, like most people, or Yurio, like everyone in fucking Hasetsu, but _Yura_ like his grandfather calls him every time Yuri drops his bags and runs into his arms like he’s still twelve. _Yura_ , just on the edge of too familiar but not, and something the younger Viktor never presumed to try.

“Time,” Yuri scoffs, tilting the bottle to his lips again. He’s too drunk for this. He’s not drunk enough. “Next Olympics, I’ll be twenty-one. Then, twenty-five. Then, twenty-nine. I’m not even going to get a _chance_ to break your three-gold streak, let alone match your four medals.”

“Then, you’ll be thirty-three,” Viktor says like it’s nothing, then adds, “I’m going to compete in 2022.”

Yuri chokes.

“Are you _crazy?_ ” he demands after he’s hacked the bubbles out of his lungs, because fuck, this is officially the worst news he’s heard today, which is saying something considering fucking _Leroy_. “You’re going to break your back! You’ll make the Katsudon cry! There’s no way in hell you’ll medal!”

Viktor looks at him steadily. “Maybe,” he says. “But you’ll medal, and my Yuuri will too. And you’ll know that it’s possible.”

Yuri puts his head in his hands, because he just _can’t_. He doesn’t understand this Viktor at _all_.

“Possible to compete at, what, thirty-fucking- _four?_ ” he grits through his teeth, head spinning from the alcohol, or maybe from fucking _Viktor_. “What’s that going to prove?”

“That you can still compete at thirty-three,” Viktor tells him. “That _you_ can beat _me_.”

Yuri wants to tell him that he has, that he _did_ , two years ago when he first broke his SP record, last year at the GPF where Viktor didn’t even medal, this year at the NHK Trophy. Somehow, though, all those victories, they pale at this loss. This is it, the pinnacle of their careers. It’s the _Olympics_.

Viktor leans back against the wall, putting a finger to his lips in the infuriating manner he must have picked up sometime between sixteen and twenty-four. Yuri takes a fortifying drink, because Viktor is _thinking_ , and that rarely ends well for anyone else.

“You never asked me if I remembered,” he says eventually. Yuri’s alcohol-riddled brain takes a full minute to catch up.

They didn’t talk about it. The few others who know still refer to it sometimes, what the Russian team has taken to calling The Incident, and Yuri imagines Viktor must have discussed it with Katsuki, but he’d poured his own anger and tears out in Otabek’s apartment in Almaty, come back to St. Petersburg two weeks into the preseason, and aggressively pretended he was fine until he actually was. The only acknowledgement he made of the fact that it ever happened at all was when he half-bullied the older Viktor, the _only_ Viktor since then, into choreographing him a routine built around the unique, breathtaking step sequence his younger self left Yuri as a parting gift, the one that won him three separate golds that season.

Viktor never brought it up either. No one else would have had enough knowledge to tell him everything, and Yuri just—assumed he didn’t remember.

“I thought you didn’t,” he says, only slightly aware that he’s slurring. “ _Do_ you?”

Viktor pulls the bottle out of Yuri’s slack fingers and drinks. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “Not really. Impressions, for the most part. Ideas.” He pauses, then says, “You.”

“Me,” Yuri repeats dumbly. Viktor’s eyes are indecipherable.

“I’ve made you a lot of promises over the years, Yura.” There it is again, _Yura_. A constant reminder, and Yuri isn’t sure which of them it’s for. “I kept one. I didn’t forget you.”

Yuri doesn’t know what to say, then he does, rage finally breaking through the haze of alcohol and shock. He lunges forward on his knees, grabs for the front of Viktor’s Team Russia jacket and shakes him hard, too furious to remember that Viktor is older and stronger and has a nasty right hook.

“Why would you tell me this _now?_ ” he demands, cheeks hot with anger and fuck, eyes burning with tears. He slams Viktor into the wall and Viktor lets him, looking at him so calmly that Yuri sees red.

Viktor catches his fist. “I’m not going to let you hit me,” he says, and Yuri shoves him again with all his strength. The _thump_ of his back hitting the wall rings loud in the stillness of the empty hall.

“Why are you telling me this now,” Yuri hisses again. This close, it’s impossible to ignore that he’s no longer a foot shorter than Viktor. He’s still taller, but Yuri can hold his gaze now without even lifting his chin.

“Because you should know that you’re not the one who’s spent his whole life chasing me,” Viktor tells him, matter-of-fact. Yuri can’t even tell if he’s angry, and that’s probably the biggest different between the two Viktors, he thinks. At some point, teenage Viktor grabbed hold of the _anger-passion-fear_ he’d wanted Yuri to teach him to harness and instead tamped it down, stowed it away and made himself into someone new.

“What?” Yuri says intelligently, and Viktor laughs in his face. He pulls Yuri’s other hand away from his jacket and smooths it out. There’s a smile on his face that’s neither mean nor happy, just there. Like he doesn’t realize he’s smiling.

He’s so _different_. Even more since Katsuki.

“I didn’t remember—everything,” Viktor muses, tutting at the champagne spilled over the carpet where he dropped the bottle. There wasn’t much left, but it’ll leave a stain. “Like I said, it’s mostly just impressions. An old poodle. Phones that took great pictures. A boy with a temper.” His smile grows wider, fonder. “Quads. So many quads I couldn’t do.”

Yuri opens his mouth, but Viktor’s not done. “Don’t you understand, Yura?” he pushes. “I’m here now because you showed me these things were _possible_. That’s why I chased the quad Lutz, and the flip.”

He goes silent for a long moment, then adds, very soft, “It’s why I didn’t give up after I—fell.”

Viktor’s fall. Yuri knows it, just like everyone else. The injury that should have been career-ending, but wasn’t.

Yuri closes his eyes, the fight draining out of his body. Viktor must feel his fist loosen because he releases it, and when Yuri sways into his space he cups the back of his neck and lets him lean on him. Drunk as he is, Yuri can admit to himself that this is nice. Viktor gives good hugs. Yuri hasn’t let him hold him since he—came back.

They stay there for a while, Yuri’s breath ragged against Viktor’s collarbone, his arms tucked between their bodies.

“Is that why you offered me that deal?” he asks eventually. “No quads, and you’d choreograph my senior debut routine?”

Viktor hums in agreement. “I didn’t really know it was you until I saw you jump. Quad sal, at twelve years old. I had to do something, or you would’ve wrecked your body before you hit seniors. And then you wouldn’t have been there, when I needed you to be.”

Viktor Nikiforov needed him. It’s still impossible sometimes to reconcile the Viktor he’d gotten to know, young and rude and just as desperate as Yuri to catch up to all the legends who came before, with this one, who’s a little immature and a lot flighty and polite to a fault, and already a legend.

“You’re the reason my base score was so low these past seasons,” Yuri admits only because he has a lot of champagne in him. “Only two quads to everyone else’s three or four.”

Viktor thumps him on the back, admonishing. “Your base score wasn’t low; you had more combinations,” he says. “And this is why you’ll be back in four years with the first quad axel landed in competition to add to your name.”

 _Do you really think I can do it?_ Yuri almost asks, but he hasn’t lost _all_ his inhibitions yet, and he still has some dignity, so he pulls away with some effort instead. The whole world tilts to the side, and Viktor catches his shoulders to steady him.

Yuri blinks up at his smiling blue eyes, leans in, and kisses him.

Viktor doesn’t push him away. He kisses back, soft and dry and sweet and—different. Too different. Boring.

Yuri sits back, so disappointed he could cry.

He feels Viktor’s hands wipe at his wet cheeks, big and rough from hundreds of falls and off-ice training, and keeps his eyes closed. The hands in his memory will never be this way, he realizes. They’ll always stay small, teenage-soft. The Viktor from his memory will never get to grow old.

“Oh, Yura,” Viktor sighs, and draws him back into his arms to let him wail into his jacket, long and ugly and loud.

At least he doesn’t have to worry about anyone coming to investigate. In the Olympic village, he’s not the only one crying tonight.

 

 

 

“Can we not tell the Katsudon?” Yuri knows he sounds pathetic, voice hoarse and snot clogging his n’s. Viktor laughs, adjusting his hold so Yuri doesn’t tip over as they walk back to his room.

“Which part?” he asks, eyes glittering with mischief. Yuri elbows him in the kidney. “Ouch! Really, Yura, violence is never the answer.”

“Why didn’t you learn this lesson _before_ you punched me?” Yuri grumbles, leaning more of his weight onto Viktor because he’s cried himself mostly into sobriety and there’s a consequent headache already pounding at his temples.

“I was younger than you are now!” Viktor protests. “I didn’t actually remember that bit, or anything else concrete, until I came back here. It was all vague flashes until then. Like fuzzy, fading dreams. What a waste,” he sighs dramatically. “If only I’d retained the knowledge of _how_ to land the Lutz and flip, instead of just knowing they were _doable_. I wouldn’t have had to wait five years.”

“Shut up,” Yuri mumbles. “Why aren’t you with _him_ , anyway? Shouldn’t you two be celebrating or something?”

“Instead of going around kissing underage teenagers, you mean?” Viktor teases, to be _even more_ annoying. God, Yuri doesn’t know what he was thinking. This Viktor is hot enough to jerk off to, but that’s about it. Yuri can’t imagine how he _grew up_ to be this bad instead of the other way around.

“You’re avoiding the question,” he points out, and feels more than sees Viktor roll his eyes, exasperated.

“Probably the same reason you’re not with Otabek tonight,” he says. “My Yuuri is rather a sore loser.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Yuri says, disbelieving. “He won bronze at his _first Olympics_.”

“And I won gold,” Viktor says. They arrive at the right door, and Yuri fumbles for his key. He’s pretty sure his roommate isn’t in, celebrating his bronze medal balls-deep in some Canadian hockey player, probably. “He can’t help it, Yura. Just like you can’t help how you feel about Otabek’s silver.”

“At least he medaled,” Yuri sulks, letting go of Viktor to drop heavily onto his mattress. As predicted, the rest of the room is empty. Viktor turns around to rummage in Yuri’s suitcase, pulling out a ratty shirt and sweatpants. He tosses them at Yuri’s head.

“And he’ll be happy about that tomorrow,” he says, looking for Yuri’s water bottle while Yuri wrestles with his clothes. “Tonight, silver hates gold, bronze hates gold and silver, and everyone else hates all three.”

“The first night is always the hardest,” Yuri recites, giving up on the shirt. He pulls the drawstring of his pants tight and holds out his hand for the water. Viktor sits on the empty bed and puts his chin in his hands.

“What?” Yuri barks when he’s drained the bottle, and winces at his own loudness. Champagne hangovers are awful and Viktor, who has an unreasonable tolerance for it, will be entirely unsympathetic tomorrow.

Viktor shakes his head, smiling at him fondly. “Just thinking about something my Yuuri said once. _I didn’t know you then, but you were my first love_.”

Yuri stills. He’s heard that before, from Katsuki. Yuri had heard that, and said, _gross_.

“Yeah?” he manages after a moment, blood rushing in his ears.

Viktor hums. “I didn’t understand what he meant when he said it,” he says. “I think I do now.”

Yuri blinks at him in shock and opens his mouth reflexively, but Viktor shoots him a quelling look and rocks to his feet. “It’s in the past, Yura,” he says, gentle like he didn’t just hand over a gift Yuri didn’t know he needed and ask for nothing in return. This Viktor is kind, and sometimes selfless, and still pretty fucking mean. He’s in love with someone else, and not the same person at all.

Yuri climbs under the covers, mute. _Me too_ , he wants to shout, but who would he tell? This Viktor doesn’t care to know, and Yuri doesn’t particularly care to tell him. Like Viktor said, it’s in the past, now.

“I’m going to beat you next time,” he calls, just as Viktor’s about to step into the hall. It’s such a stupid thing to promise, four years away during which anything could go wrong, but he wants Viktor to know he gets it. That he wants Viktor to return the favor, and show him what’s _possible_.

Viktor laughs. “I’ll hold you to it,” he says. “Go to sleep, Yura. It will be better in the morning.”

 

 

 

It is.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> comments are the best kind of love, and i'd be very happy if you could also [share on tumblr](http://foxfireflamequeen.tumblr.com/post/158981376208/where-the-time-goes)!


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